Creating a Viral Marketing Campaign Creating a viral marketing campaign, while not difficult, does take careful planning. You must be strategic and clearly define your goal (or goals) as well as the means you will use to achieve them. Here are a few simple steps to follow that will guide you through the process of creating and devising your viral marketing campaign. Step 1: Clearly define your goals. What is it you are trying to achieve? Are you trying to attain a certain number of click-thrus? Are you trying to grow your customer base? Or simply attract visitors to your site? No matter what the goal, you must know what it is before you can achieve it. Step 2: Choose which outlets you will use. Do you plan to employ social media to apply your viral marketing messaging to? Will you focus on your blog as a means to get your message across? Or will you submit articles to multiple directories in hopes of driving traffic? No way is better than the other, but try to choose at least 3 means of viral marketing, ensuring that each approach is unique, yet compliments the others. For example, if you write a blog post as part of your viral marketing campaign, you can then drive people to read the post by tweeting about it, as well as emailing the link to your list. Another example might be, if you create a video and post it on YouTube, you can drive traffic to the video by sending the link as a download or embedding it on your Facebook wall. Step 3: Carefully craft your message. Once you know what your message is going to be, it will be much easier to know how to apply it depending on the outlets you plan to employ. In other words, say you set out to write an article. Once you know the title, you can then craft that title into 140 characters or less for Twitter, and post a slightly longer description on Facebook. Do you see how this all weaves together so beautifully? That is why viral marketing has become such a strong force to be reckoned with in and among the online business community. It truly is a powerful way of communicating, of advertising and of doing business. Now, more than ever before, we have the ability to communicate in real-time in such a way that carries a single message to millions within seconds. While marketing in general has its limitations, the possibilities are endless. It’s up to you to make the most of your messaging and turn your target market into paying customers. And remember, its not only about them. It’s about who they are willing to share your message, your product, your business with. That is the essence of viral marketing. Keep this gold rule in mind and you will be on the path to success… or to going “viral” as they say. History And Viral Marketing Perhaps due to the fact that the Internet is new, most people think that "viral" marketing is very recent and doesn't have much of a history on which to draw. In fact the concept of viral marketing is actually ancient. Only the term and its modern application are new, though not as recent as you might think! The modern incarnation of viral marketing is normally attributed to Steve Jurvetson, a managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the founding VC investor in Hotmail and Kana, and previously an R&D engineer at Hewlett-Packard. The term "Viral Marketing" is almost ten years old now, and refers to a new incarnation of "word of mouth" advertising, a technique that's existed since time began. How does "word of mouth" advertising classify as "viral" marketing you ask? Well think about it. The concept of viral marketing is that it perpetuates itself though existing (low or no cost) media: word of mouth is exactly that in its purest form. Since Cain heard how much Abel was loved and got jealous, this type of advertisement has been generating reactions from others. You can review a lot of history, human nature and past campaigns to see what has worked and what has not worked. Most importantly is having or gaining an understanding of personalities and people so you can learn how to influence them to spread your message when you want them to-and that's without doing anything that can harm you or your business. It is a well-known axiom that word of mouth can either kill or make a company, and that bad news seems to travel much further and faster than good news. Studies have shown that people are much more likely to speak out when they are upset than when they are happy with a service or company. Simply put, people expect to get good service and don't react when they get it. If they get poor or insufficient service or goods, they feel that they HAVE to respond to "get even." The facts vary from research groups, but the consensus is that between two and eight people will complain about something that is upsetting for every one person who will speak out about good service. This is why it is so important to understand customer relations and what makes people happy and what can make them upset in any interaction. While viral marketing is more about getting the customer to come TO you, you also need to do a good job once you get them and make sure you meet (or preferably exceed) all their expectation. Otherwise, you may find your own viral campaign being used against you, sabotaging the results you hoped to achieve!
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